Friday, 13 July 2012

I found myself promoting consultancies run by or employing PhD anthropologists
in the early noughties boomlet for such companies described by a new post by Laurel George
here: http://savageminds.org/2012/07/11/anthropology-of-snacks-widgets-and-pills/. They wanted to cultivate a mystique around
anthropology/ethnography and position bone fide academically trained
practitioners and their approaches to research as essential to solving certain business
problems relating to marketing and R&D.

This goal
was somewhat undermined by a legion of rivals newly describing their own
qualitative approaches as ethnography, making it hard to bring attention to the
particular skills possessed by anthropologists and further removing the process
from anything the academy would recognise (Simon Roberts lists many of the
approaches lumped under the umbrella of ‘ethnography’ in the book edited by
Sarah Pink ‘Applications of Anthropology’, pg.86). That's not to ignore the prior adoption and adaptation of ethnography in the hands of other academic disciplines.

Arguments
about what is or isn’t ethnography aside, the boomlet did help to spread the word
about anthropology. On a personal level, without it my interest in
anthropology may have never been piqued to the extent of pursuing a Masters in
digital anthropology at UCL.

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

UCL hosted eminent (commercial) anthropologist and definitively NOT the inventor of the green photocopier button Lucy Suchman on Monday. Having tired of working at Xerox a while ago and now back in academia she turned her experience into a paper due to go to the ARA later this year. The thrust was that there is a poor fit between what anthropology/ethnography can offer and what a commercial ‘centre of innovation research’ expects in terms of deliverables.

Not me, guv

Her biggest gripe was with different understandings of innovation i.e. as discontinuous, transformative, centralisable and down to the efforts of a heroic designer vs. the reality of innovation as a gradualist, reproductive, contingent, distributed and collaborative process.

Check out ex Intel anthropologist Simon Roberts' blog, Ideas Bazaar, for another take on 'Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter', incidentally-on-purpose the title of an instructive book by Melissa Cefkin which looks at the pluses as well as minuses.